The contemporary urban environment is brimming with rich visual cues that provide valuable directional and informational content to sighted individuals. The goal of the GroZi project at the UCSD division of Calit2 is to make significant advances toward making these visual cues universally accessible in a problem domain that is constrained but at the same time challenging and representative of a larger class of related real-world problems. In particular, our anticipated project outcome is to develop computer vision technology combined with a haptic/auditory feedback interface to help blind and visually impaired individuals execute the task of grocery shopping in a safe and independent manner. By enabling users with a device that can exploit existing visual cues, we avoid the overhead of requiring expensive and time consuming retagging of the urban environment. In this talk I will present our progress and outline the challenges that lie ahead on the problems of detection and recognition of groceries and aisle signs.